Commentary

Any war, including the current one, now six painful years-long, pits Ukrainians fighting for their independence against Russian aggression. Beyond the military confrontation, the war also involves a highly defined confrontation between two fundamentally different social systems that are at the core of the conflict. However, despite the existential stakes involved, the counterintuitive situation in Ukrainian society is characterized by ambiguity and indeterminateness. The ruling political force seems to be concealing or obscuring the public articulation of its position and preventing an understanding of what current policy is. In such cases, civil society always tries, especially through the media, to pose “real questions” about issues of public concern. Nevertheless, today it is unclear what exactly such “questions” should look like...

Brooke draws comparisons with existing frozen conflicts in the Russian-occupied parts of Moldova and Georgia. Russia has occupied Moldova’s Transnistria for almost 30 years and shows no signs of leaving. In the cases of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, the shooting war may be over, but Russia regularly sends troops into the Georgian countryside at night to advance the borders and add to the territory they already occupy. In all three instances, Russia is not going anywhere. One would hope that the world has learned enough from the experiences of Moldova and Georgia to avoid heading down the same path in Ukraine. The goal of the international community should not be to allow yet another Russian occupation to become permanent. Accepting a frozen conflict would be a betrayal of the...

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly posed a rhetorical question to an NPR reporter: “Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?” By scheduling his own visit to Ukraine on Friday, Jan. 31, Pompeo is demonstrating that they should. Indeed, his visit is a timely reminder that this vast European country’s success in overcoming Russian aggression and reforming a corrupt politico-economic system is far more important to the United States than merely serving as a backdrop for U.S. domestic political battles. Ukraine is a nation of more than 40 million people, the largest country geographically that is fully within Europe, a potential agricultural and...

On February 2, 2020 the League of Ukrainian Canadians hosted an evening with the former prisoner of conscience Oleg Sentsov. The director, writer and activist was born in Crimea in an ethnic Russian family. Like most Crimeans, he grew up speaking Russian, but, like an apparent minority of them, he identified strongly as a Ukrainian citizen, and opposed the Russian occupation. In February of 2014 he took part in the Maidan that brought down the Ukrainian President...

Volodymyr Zelensky in a televised address congratulated Ukrainians on New Year's holidays, calling for unity. Zelensky delivers New Year's greetings to the nation / snap from video Volodymyr Zelensky on New Year's eve delivered his first presidential greeting to the nation. "Dear Ukrainians. Usually, in the New Year's greetings, presidents tell us about GDP growth, lower inflation, 'implementation', 'diversification', and other obscure terms. In general, they convince us that we've actually started living better, it's just that we haven't noticed this yet, so very often we just put our TVs on mute during the president's address and wait until he's done with his fairytale to finally move on to champagne, sandwiches with sprats, and a traditional New Year's salad. Tonight it's going to be different. Tonight everyone will honestly answer themselves an important question: who am I? A president of Ukraine, a successful lawyer, an ordinary housewife, a philosophy department student from Kyiv Mohyla Academy, or an agronomist from Cherkasy region? Who am I?..

2019 has been quite an eventful year in Ukraine’s tech sphere. A new government is in place, which claims to have put digitalisation and the IT sphere among its top priorities. Social media and online have played an important role in society and politics. Many foundations have been laid for the future development of the tech sphere in Ukraine. Let’s take a look at ten key tech-related developments which marked this year for Ukrainians...

Daniel Bilak is on a mission. The former Torontonian, who now calls Kyiv home, wants to rebrand Ukraine. “What we really want to do is to get the message across that there is new Ukraine,” Bilak says, taking a short break from his regimen of shaking hands and making introductions at a busy conference room at the Ukraine Reform Conference hosted at the Royal York Fairmount Hotel in downtown Toronto. “We want to break down stereotypes, we want to break down people’s views of Ukraine as this sort of basket case, failed state nation that the Russians and many Western media promote”...

Every year, Russian president Vladimir Putin holds a huge, end-of-the-year press conference for Russian and international press. Ukraine is traditionally an important topic. This year, Putin held his 15th year-end press conference on December 19. What Putin said about Ukrainian President Volo­dymyr Zelenskyy, Kremlin influence over the leaders of the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk “people’s republics,” Ukrainian land reform, and who, by his words, “grabbed me by the throat” in Minsk, when will the eastern Ukrainian border be closed, payments by Gazprom to Ukraine’s Naftogaz, and what he thinks about presidential term limits in Russia – in our piece. About...

When I spoke with the Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan this past summer, at a café in the ninth district of Vienna, I found him much gentler than I had imagined him to be. As a public persona, Zhadan is sexy and tough and the lead singer of a ska band called Sobaky v Kosmosi, or Dogs in Outer Space. His music is post-proletarian punk, his poetry is lyrical, and his novels recall William Burroughs and the Beats, with the occasional intrusion of Latin American-style magical realism. Yet in person Zhadan was a self-reflective conversation partner and a careful listener. He is conscious of his role as the unofficial bard of eastern Ukraine—and still more conscious of the moral responsibility he bears for his words. There are not many people from his part of the world whose words reach beyond its borders. Zhadan is among a handful of Ukrainian authors whose work has been widely translated. His most recent novel, “Voroshilovgrad,” won the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature in Switzerland; he has drawn enthusiastic audiences in Austria, Germany, Poland, and Russia...

The self-proclaimed ‘Donetsk people’s republic’ [‘DPR’] announced on 29 November that is has adopted a ‘law’ defining what it claims to be its ‘state territory’. Unlike the actual area under ‘DPR’ control, the document asserts that the borders encompass the entire Donetsk oblast. Since this so-called ‘republic’ has only been ‘recognized’ by one equally illegitimate Russian-controlled territory (South Ossetia), the move is formally meaningless. Politically, it is not, as it comes just 10 days before a scheduled ‘Normandy summit’ between the Presidents of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany and flies in the face of the Minsk Accords...